2013.06.18

Tomorrow, at the ICA Conference in London, I'll be presenting data from one of my forthcoming journal articles with my friend Mark Latonero. It's got tons of data from two surveys of over 5,000 people around the globe, tracking the changes in their awareness, engagement with, and opinions regarding "configurable culture" between 2006 and 2010.

2013.05.15

My new book The Piracy Crusade will be published this December, and I'm incredibly excited to have illustrator and comic journalist Josh Neufeld doing the cover art for me. Josh has now sent me initial sketches outlining a few cover ideas, and has consented to let me use the "wisdom of the crowd" to help develop the cover idea further, just as I did with the text of the book itself.

The book's basic premise is that "digital piracy" is a boogeyman promoted by legacy content cartels in order to justify increasingly draconian intellectual property laws, treaties and policies whose primary purpose is to bolster their (eroding) market dominance. Unfortunately, the secondary effects of this agenda (exemplified by initiatives such as PIPA, SOPA, ACTA and CISPA) is to undermine the foundations of democratic society by eliminating protections for free speech, privacy and market competition, while weakening checks and balances against corporate and governmental overreach.

Josh has sent me four cover ideas, and I'd love your help in choosing between them. The first is the one that I initially outlined for him -- in which two battleships, one flying the copyright flag and the other flying the copyleft flag, are engaged in a naval battle, and the resulting smoke creates the phantom of the Jolly Roger:

The second cover idea is very similar, but it eliminates the Jolly Roger smoke, which Josh says would give more prominence and detail to the ships, and unclutter the overall design:

The third concept also features the copyright and copyleft ships, but puts them in relation to each other along the Z-axis with foreshortening, rather than portraying them side-by-side:

Finally, the fourth cover idea is a radical departure from the nautical imagery, and just features a Jolly Roger with copyright and copyleft symbols for eyes:

I need to choose one of these ideas, or propose a new one, to Josh ASAP, so he can get to work on the art itself. I welcome your comments and suggestions!

2013.04.22

This weekend, I was fortunate to host a keynote discussion between media theorist (and Moog afficionado) Trevor Pinch and DJ/author Paul D. Miller, a/k/a DJ Spooky. It was part of an excellent conference called "Extending Play" organized by the doctoral students at Rutgers SC&I.

Our panel was a lot of fun -- a freewheeling discussion that ranged from music and tech geekery to broad social theory. You can listen to the audio transcript here:

2013.01.21

Last month, I got a chance to give a talk based on my forthcoming book The Piracy Crusade at NYU, as part of the Computer Science department's Computers and Society lecture series. I always love talking to those folks, in large part because the guy who puts it together, Professor Evan Korth, is one of the coolest people I know. At a certain point, I just abandoned the presentation altogether and got into the nitty gritty. Fun ensued.

2013.01.17

This semester, I'll be teaching a class called "Copyright, Culture & Commerce" at Rutgers SC&I. I used to teach a very similar course at NYU (which I inherited from Siva Vaidhyanathan), but this is basically a complete reboot. I've built the syllabus from scratch, and made a real effort to balance some of my own opinions with conflicting ones, and to integrate debate into the classroom experience.

One of the biggest problems I've faced is that I know so much more about the subject than I did 5 years ago when I first taught the class, and have read so many more texts, that it's much harder to squeeze it all into one coherent undergraduate experience.

I welcome your feedback -- especially over the next few days, before I have to finalize the syllabus and hand it out to my students.

2012.11.29

Two weeks ago, I sat on a panel at INET New York about the "six strikes" Copyright Alert System, the bargain struck between Hollywood and America's major broadband ISPs to identify people suspected of illegally infringing copyrighted content and slowly cut off their bandwidth.

The event was very informative. For the first hour, corporate stakeholders (e.g. RIAA, MPAA, Verizon, Comcast) discussed the specifics of their plan. For the second hour, a bunch of us critics and consumer advocates (e.g. Gigi Sohn, Jeff Jarvis) responded to the plan, raising several questions and concerns.

Then there was a final mega-panel in which both groups got to address each other directly. I don't think any of us had our minds changed 180 degrees, but I'm pretty sure we all gained some deeper insight into what's at stake here.
The full video of the event is below. Surprisingly riveting for a wonkfest.

p.s. As of today, the CAS launch has been postponed till next year (ostensibly due to Hurricane Sandy)

2012.11.20

A few weeks ago, I spoke at an event with P2P defense attorney Ray Beckerman on behalf of Ben Kallos' bid for a NYC Council seat. Here's the full video of the event, which covers a fair amount of copyright, law & policy stuff: